Chapters (43)
- Cover
- Dedication
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-one
- Twenty-two
- Twenty-three
- Twenty-four
- Twenty-five
- Twenty-six
- Twenty-seven
- Twenty-eight
- Twenty-nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-one
- Thirty-two
- Thirty-three
- Thirty-four
- Epilogue
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
- AUTHOR’S NOTE
- Readers Guide
- QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
- About the Author
- What’s next onyour reading list?
Andra pulled her knees up to her chest, watching LJ through the window. He put away the gas pump, started toward the driver’s-side door, and then doubled back and paced another lap behind the truck. His thick shoulders hunched, every muscle fiber cranked taut. A flicker of movement caught her eye, and she turned to see the gas station clerk watching through the station’s window, her thin arms folded tightly over her uniform shirt.
Andra didn’t blame the girl. Right now, LJ was six feet five inches of simmering energy, and nothing about him looked safe. After a week of cooking lessons, though, she was learning to read him. When he went silent and inwardly drawn, it was because he was too angry to trust himself to speak, but not at her. When she’d first confessed she’d been attacked, he’d gotten very, very quiet. She understood that kind of anger: the sort you could never quite swallow.
It was nice to not be the only one feeling it, for once.
LJ got into the truck. His hands were so careful as they gripped the steering wheel that it was obvious he was capable of breaking it.
Andra rested her chin atop her bent knees, wincing. “You okay?”
His chin twitched sideways in half a head shake that never made it back the other way. His palm tapped the wheel once, twice. She tensed as she waited for the third tap. It never came, and he didn’t turn on the truck.
“Please, just . . . tell me how you got away. How it ended. Otherwise, I’m not real sure I’m ever going to sleep again.”
Andra didn’t talk about the things Gavin had done to her in that room. Not to her family or therapists. Not to anybody but the cops and the courts. But she’d googled LJ’s home neighborhood a few days ago, and the first pictures that had come up were of terrified people clinging to their roofs during Hurricane Katrina, just to stay above the floodwaters. He understood what it meant to be trapped. And she wanted him to know that whatever else Gavin had done to her, he hadn’t won.
“I worked out the screws holding the headboard on. With my fingernails.”
LJ looked over and blinked, his eyes nearly black, and she could tell he didn’t understand.
“When he left the morning after he took me, I was afraid he was never going to let me go—” She broke off, ducking her chin against her knees.
The hopelessness of that realization wasn’t something she cared to remember, even now.